Monthly Archives: February 2022

Once again, some among us are falsely interpreting the intent of the Constitutions guarantee of freedom of speech.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that falsely yelling Fire! in a crowded place is not protected. So its obvious that constitutional scholars using common sense can interpret the intended limits of acceptable, responsible and democratic freedom of speech, ensuring the safety and well-being of all.

The premise that just one tiny pushback to one persons free speech will lead to an autocratic state is bogus. Without limits to untruthful, unscientific and noninclusive lies, a democratic nation plunges toward disaster. To begin: Define ethics parameters for all persons who are in elected office (local to national); all running for elected office, and radio, TV, phone and internet businesses.

This would not squelch free speech. It would demand that any person or business would have to support any statement with verifiable evidence at the time of presentation. This would allow another to seek legal recourse if misinformation is intentionally spoken or allowed that could result in the loss of safety or well-being of others. It would encourage free speech from real Americans and guard against those who spew words without any regard of truth. If we are to remain free, stop the few who are stealing our freedoms using words of hate, division and lies.

Unless you choose to talk to yourself, your speech must always safeguard the security and all the constitutional rights of others.

Jim StorerWestbrook

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Letter to the editor: Unchecked free speech can destroy freedom - pressherald.com

Iconoclast: Joe Rogan Saves Free Speech

They can have Rogan or Young. Not both. That ultimatum from singing legend Neil Young to Spotify had a justifiable sense of certainty, quips The Hills Jonathan Turley. Spotify stuck with Rogan, and perhaps more importantly, free speech. But the choice between Rogans 11 million listeners or an aging rocker was economically clear. Spotifys music side isnt raking in much profit; Rogan and podcasts are a cash machine, with revenue up a staggering 627 percent. This is good news for free speech. Normally, companies see no profit in defending dissenting viewpoints. Now, for the first time, the economics may have actually worked against censorship and for free speech.

Libertarian: Public Health Camouflage

The pandemic era, argues Reasons Peter Suderman, has revealed a tendency to use public health as a pretext for some other goal that has little or nothing to do with public health. Neil Youngs fight with Spotify and New Yorks battle over to-go cocktails are both over non-COVID issues. Liquor-store lobbyists worked heavily against extending the [to -go cocktail] policy for selfish reasons but claim its a public-health issue. Young cited Joe Rogans chats with vax-deniers, but he took his music down from all streaming services in 2015, complaining that low-quality streaming devalued his music. Both used the totalizing emergency of the pandemic to cast their moves as pure and selfless when the reality is anything but.

Conservative: Dems To Pay for Border Bungles

The Biden administration doesnt seem much interested in the havoc on our southern border, notes Jason L. Riley at The Wall Street Journal, yet its worsening, and Republicans will make it a campaign theme for the midterms. People have seen record levels of illicit crossing, overflowing detention centers and, more recently, video footage of illegal immigrants being ferried (in the dead of night) across the country with disastrous results. Immigrants respond to incentives, and Dems have encouraged them to try their luck. President Donald Trumps rhetoric was often over-the-top, but his point (Americans should get to decide who comes here) resonated. Team Bidens failure to grasp this could cost Democrats dearly in November.

Foreign desk: Xi Must Win Olympics

If Chinese President Xi Jinping wants to stay in power to achieve his goal of being Dictator for Life he needs to win the 2022 Winter Games, asserts Gordon G. Chang at Newsweek. Xi seeks a precedent-breaking third term as general secretary of the Communist Party instead of following recent custom and retiring. That would batter the power of the party, which since the 1980s worked to establish rules, customs and guidelines to limit leaders, the result of elite horror at the near-absolute power of Mao Zedong. The partys next National Congress, likely this fall, will decide Xis fate. So Xi, whos personally supervising the Olympics, needs no scandals, no terrorism, no visible protests about Uyghurs or other issues. And most of all, given Chinas role in unleashing the global pandemic, it means Xis zero COVID strategy must work.

Analyst: Mike Pences Moment

Ex-prez Donald Trumps insistence that he won the 2020 election remains a serious problem for Republicans nationwide, explains Henry Olsen at The Washington Post. Candidates cant ignore him, so the GOP could be saddled with a large number of 2020 truthers in the midterms. And while the emperor has no clothes, it takes someone with the courage to say it out loud to break the spell. Ex-veep Mike Pence is the perfect person to do this, as the vast majority of Republicans and GOP officeholders respect him. And since hes now under direct attack from Trump, he is also the natural person to rebut Trumps false claims. He really only has two choices: Shrink into private life entirely or someday meet his fate as the man with the conviction and stature needed to engage with Trump in this battle.

Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

Continued here:
Joe Rogan saved free speech and other commentary - New York Post

In 1985, at the height of popularity for the faddish baby dolls, the Cabbage Patch Kids, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman debuted a subversive line of trading cards, the Garbage Pail Kids.

Featuring viscerally queasy drawings of, say, a mushroom cloud detonating from the roof of a cheery toddlers skull, or a Raggedy Ann facsimile barfing up dinner into a pot, the Garbage Pail Kids were a sensation among edgy preteens all over the world. They were also swiftly banned in a slew of schools. To this day, Mexico has a law restricting the import and export of Garbage Pail Kids material.

You know how Joe Manchin is a thorn in our side? Spiegelman asked in a phone interview this week. His uncle, A Jamie Manchin, was the state treasurer of West Virginia in the 80s. He said that Garbage Pail Kids should be banned because theyre subverting children. It runs in his family.

It reminds me that things keep changing, but were still dealing with permutations of the same struggles.

The latest permutation came last week, when the McMinn county board of education in Tennessee voted to remove Spiegelmans 1991 Holocaust memoir, Maus, from its middle-school curriculum. Though the board cited the graphic novels use of non-sexual nudity and light profanity in defending its decision, the ban is part of a wave of scholastic censorship in the US, largely led by an agitated conservative movement and targeting books that deal with racism or LGBTQ issues.

But the author of the Pulitzer prizewinning graphic novel, which tells the story of his parents experience as Polish Jews during the Holocaust, traces his own free speech radicalism to a very different inflection point in Americas censorship wars. As a teenager, Spiegelman found himself siding with the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, a town with a significant population of Holocaust survivors.

The ACLU lost a lot of members because they defended their right to march, he said. And I just thought that seemed right. Let them march, and if theres any more trouble, stop them. I thought that was a conversation that had to take place.

It shaped me.

Born in Sweden after his parents were liberated from Auschwitz, Spiegelman grew up in Queens, New York, and began cartooning before he reached high school. He was a fixture of the 70s Bay Area underground comix scene, rubbing shoulders with world-renowned provocateurs like Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton. The work that birthed from that era was truly brazen depicting drugs, violence and sex, with a thirsty anticipation for backlash.

Spiegelman says that he and his peers drew much of their rage from the rampant censorship campaign that targeted the comics industry in the 1950s a time when, due to federal pressure, publishing houses instituted the Comics Code, which repressed even the teensiest adversarial tone in the work of mainstream cartoonists.

There were literally parents and clergymen gathering comic books from kids and burning them in bonfires, he said. We as cartoonists of that generation loved the salacious, raucous, uninhibited expression of id. We wanted to topple every article of the Comics Code if we could.

He began to publish the deeply personal Maus as a serialized comic in 1980 in Raw, an annual comics anthology he edited with his wife, Franoise Mouly. But Spiegelman maintained a fascination with both high and low culture, leading him to pursue projects like the Garbage Pail Kids.

Spiegelman hasnt exclusively rankled political conservatives. In 1993, in the aftermath of the Crown Heights riots, he drew a cover for the New Yorker that featured a Hasidic man and a Black woman bonded by a passionate kiss. The imagery ruffled feathers, even within traditionally liberal enclaves. Spiegelman recalls one baffling criticism from a member of the New Yorker editorial staff, who believed that his cover depicted a Hasidic man hiring an escort. (That clearly was not the case.)

A decade later, in 2002, Spiegelman struggled to find a domestic home for his 9/11-themed anthology of comics called In the Shadow of No Towers. Eventually he was forced to take it overseas to the German newspaper Die Zeit, due to what Spiegelman believes was the frothing jingoism that gripped the country after the attack.

It was saying the unsayable. Theres one big panel in the second or third installment of In The Shadow of No Towers where Im trying to take a nap at my drawing table. Osama bin Laden is on my left with a scimitar, while George W Bush is on my right with a gun to my head, he says. I think one of the people at the New Yorker said that I was crazy, that I was talking about those two things as equal threats. When that got back to me I said, No, youre right. America is a much larger threat.

Now Spiegelman is gearing up for the same war hes been fighting since he first started drawing cartoons more than 50 years ago. The characters and context have changed, but his core ethics have not. In fact, the more I talked to Spiegelman, the more I got the sense that the Maus censorship has shaken him more than any of his previous brushes against authority. When you consider the many years children have turned to the book to better understand the Holocaust, its not hard to understand why.

Still, the current controversy has also neatly illustrated one of the foundational principles of the publishing industry: nothing drives up interest in a book faster than a misguided prohibition. Maus is topping bestsellers lists across the country, as readers everywhere clamor to see what the fuss is about.

You know how they publish book galleys before books are published? On the back of them it says, Published April 3 and a list of things thats being done to publicize the book? I see a future where it says, Published April 3, banned May 12, Spiegelman said. That would be the end date of anything they need to do to publicize the book.

I hope that dawning reality adds some clarity to the culture war, which is why its reassuring to watch Maus blast off to the top of the sales charts. The conceit that the left consists exclusively of nosy schoolmarms, while the right is united in first amendment patriotism, has surely been rendered counterfeit by now.

This week has been like, Well, whos the snowflake now? said Spiegelman. Lets keep those words in mind.

View post:
Art Spiegelman on Maus and free speech: Whos the snowflake now? - The Guardian

Some members of Congress apparently think that Facebook, Twitter,and other social media giants are still not doing enough to censor the politicalviews of conservatives on their platforms.

Speaker Nancy Pelosis House committee investigating the eventsat the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has issuedsubpoenas to Twitter, Meta (Facebook), YouTube, Alphabet (Google), andReddit to consider whether the platforms were promoting domestic terrorism.

The tech companies are already facing lawsuits and widespread customer backlash for the one-sided silencing of politicalspeech.

In the most famous example, Twitter canceled the account of @RealDonaldTrump, then the sitting presidentof the United States, for violating its community standards. Twitter then canceled numerous other accounts and purged many followers because an algorithm determined theywere likely Russianbots.More recently, Twitter permanently removed the account of U.S. Rep. Marjorie TaylorGreen, R-Ga.

Twitter is not alone in this respect: YouTube has taken downvideos of U.S. Sens. RonJohnson and RandPaul,the latter for saying what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now admitsis trueconcerning the efficacy of cloth masks in fighting the spread of COVID.

And we know from admissions made from the podiumof the White House press room that the Biden administration is conspiring withthe social media platforms to remove so-called health disinformation. My law firmrepresents a Twitter and Facebook user who was suspendedby both platforms for posting peer-reviewed social science about the masking ofchildren at the same time the White House and surgeon general launched a coordinatedcampaign against so-called health disinformation.

Whether the topic was ballot integrity in the 2020 elections,information about COVID-19, or the events of Jan. 6, the social media platformswere on the prowl for disfavored opinions.

And yet apparently, all of that is not enough. Revoking or suspendinguser accounts, removing individual posts or video content, requiring disclaimers,and imposing accompanying links to accurate information still does not cut itas far as congressional Democrats are concerned.

Because lets be real: These subpoenas are not about gathering informationtheir purpose is intimidation. Few things send a shudder down the spine of a corporate executive at a publicly traded company like a congressional subpoena. We all know where this is headed: a front-page photo of new Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and Facebooks Mark Zuckerburg taking an oathbefore a congressional committee.

In advance of fulfilling the subpoena and testifying, the pressure from the CEOs office to corporate underlings will be intense: Give me everything weve got where weve taken steps to shut down extremist speech. Lets turn over a thousand pages documenting everything weve done. But who defines extremist?

But it will not stop there. The corollary will be equally obvious: We need to do more. I need to announce something. Lets rewrite the algorithms, lets commission more volunteer monitors, lets hire more in-house censorsgive me something to give the committee.

And so, in the name of combatting domestic terrorism, the already woke scions of Silicon Valley will censor even more speech.

Domestic terrorism is a real threatwe were reminded of that vividly a few weeks ago when an Islamic terrorist held hostagesat a Jewish synagogue in Texas. And those who broke the law on Jan. 6 deserve the full measure of justice for their violation of Americas temple of democracy.

But Speaker Pelosi and her hand-picked and one-sided Jan. 6 committee are making the most of the old Rahm Emmanuel adage, Never let a good crisis go to waste.

Under the glaring bright lights of a congressional room, the social media platforms will take the hint to do more to combat domestic terrorism, defined by the left as any speech on the right deemed unacceptable. These same platforms seem to think that no speech to the left is ever too extreme.

When Congress enacted Section 230, the law that provides liability protection for platforms that remove content, it said its purposes included ensuring the internet offer[s] a forum for a true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity.

How far Congress has fallen from that noble aspiration.

Editors note: Daniel Suhrs law firm, the Liberty Justice Center, represents Justin Hart in a lawsuit challenging Twitter and Facebooks suspension of his social media accounts.

See more here:
Another blow to free speech | WORLD - WORLD News Group

On today's showSDPB's Richard Two Bulls reports on Sicangu Community Development Corporation's food initiative program in Rosebud. It's a grassroots program to realize a return to food sovereignty to indigenous communities.

The United States has a long history of protecting free speech from government intrusion. Today we explore the famed case of United States v. One Book Called Ulysses. It's the story of a James Joyce novel, efforts to smuggle a single copy into the country to challenge obscenity laws, and how lawyers made history that impacts our ability to read what we want to read to this day. Augustana University Professor Patrick Hicks, Ph.D., and University of Sioux Falls Professor Mike Thompson, J.D., have the rollicking legal and literary drama.

Take A Moment: Poetry from Studio 47 features the work of Jane Yolen.

South Dakota state historian Ben Jones hosts a podcast calledHistory 605. On Monday, a new episode drops in which Jones interviews author and historian Gary Anderson about his book Massacre in Minnesota: The Dakota War of 1862, the Most Violent Ethnic Conflict in American History.

Fresh Tracks with David Hersrud is back with a glance into the world of popular music. Books, Boxsets, and Betty White are the theme for this week's episode. SDPB's Larry Rohrer and music industry insider David Hersrud have the story.

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A famed case over free speech, and a food initiative program in Rosebud - SDPB Radio

Freedom Convoy not about freedom Jan. 31

Geoffrey Stevens column dealt, in part, with reasonable limits on freedom of expression; I feel that there is a very reasonable limit on this right which is often overlooked:

If Peter has a right to express his opinion, then Paula has a right to ignore everything Peter has to say. The right to express ones views does not, or at least should not, imply the right to force others to listen to those views.

Protesters, salespeople, preachers and politicians are among the people who seem to get very annoyed when their words fall on deaf ears. Too bad. No one with the possible exception of the people who administer our laws -has the right to a captive audience.

In our increasingly connected world, it is important to strike a balance between the right to freedom of speech and the right to ignore the speaker. Its been called the right to disconnect, but I would suggest that the broader term, freedom from speech is more appropriate.

The rest is here:
Opinion | I have every right to ignore your free speech - TheRecord.com